Mind Sports South Africa's (MSSA) blog on competitive gaming in South Africa from proto-computer gaming all the way through to the most modern. For more about MSSA go to: https://www.facebook.com/mindsportssa/

Thursday, 13 April 2017

Journey to a New World

Just
recently I left my home town and moved abroad in the hopes to pursue a future
in eSports. There are many changes when you move, both within yourself as a
person and your environment. And it all starts from the second you step off the
airplane…

Coming from
South Africa there are things that just don’t work, or not as well as they
should. The infrastructure is lacking and being an eSports Athlete that does
make life a lot harder. I found that it was especially hard to get consistent
internet that doesn’t drop connection every hour or so. The speed was slow and
the latency high. I arrived in London, England and found out that there were
almost no homes that didn’t have fibre optic. The internet speed is such an
important aspect of eSports.

There are
other things that make living in London a huge benefit to myself. I could walk
to the local shops to get what I needed without the fear of being run over by
someone who didn’t have a license or being mugged on the way home. London being
so close to the rest of Europe also has a massive benefit in that an eSports
Athlete has easy access to other strong competition. Not only does this help
myself in improving my game but it also helps Europe. By having so much
competition so near they create a very strong central superpower in eSports.
However….

It is very expensive. Nothing here is cheap
and coming from a country where the currency gets weaker every day you feel the
punch in everything you buy. And there are problems here that many other
countries also have problems with. eSports coaching is almost nonexistent. The
only way to find coaching for many of the eSports is online over Skype or the
likes. There’s no one on one, face to face coaching and I find that that is a
major problem in making eSports bigger and stronger.

The journey
has only just begun and many more pros and cons will make themselves evident as
time goes on. For now I am convinced that the pros far outweigh the cons.